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"There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
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"I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant."
"I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process."
"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."
"I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places."
"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made."
"Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems."
"Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them."
Explore more quotes by Robert Fitzgerald
"Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way."
"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it."
"I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition."
"The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise."
"Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible."
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
"In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?"
"Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce."
"Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect."
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